Video Encoding (Not Transcoding) With FreeNas Box

[ViciousXUSMC]

I am still in the build/plan phase right now.
I keep upping my equipment choices and cost because I keep trying to decide what I want.

At first I think I just wanted a NAS, then I wanted a NAS + Plex Server, Now I think I want a NAS, Plex Server, and Encoding Machine.

I do video editing on my desktop, I have been wanting to upgrade it for a couple of years now to speed up encoding, the budget to upgrade the computer is probably going into my FreeNAS box so it makes sense to have it doing double duty.

I use MeGUI on Windows currently and a Frame Server stream lossless to the encoder. I am pretty sure I can save the file to the NAS and have the Nas box do encoding.

My question is this, what is the best and/or easiest way to do this for good x264 or possibly x265 encoding?

I saw one guide that had you put Handbrake in a Jail, I have not gotten that working yet.
Can I just create a Virtual Machine and use the same tools I use now by loading the VM? Or would the overhead of the VM dramatically decrease my performance and make this not really work?

Has anybody else tried to do something similar to make use of these awesome dual CPU server builds?

 

[Patrick]

You may be interested in FreeNAS 10. The bhyve virtualization and Docker will help a lot with running additional applications on FreeNAS machines. It is now on Beta 2 so hopefully not too much longer.

 

[ViciousXUSMC]

I think finding a way to share the resources of the NAS box is my ideal solution, I was also thinking of an ESXi setup and putting FreeNAS itself into a VM, then I can host another VM for my encoding needs.

I wonder how well FN10 will work, guess I can try the beta out.